As a sidebar note:
Simon was promoted to Moderator because he has been working to insure the forum rules and guidelines are being followed (especially in the area of formatting and code tags) and that he is in Australia.
The role of a Moderator is not to be the greatest coder, the most elegant stylist, nor the perfect POSIX follower (but those skills do not hurt either!). The roles of Moderators are to help insure the community rules and guidelines are followed (and to lead by example). We do not have any rules or community guidelines about coding style, skill or standards compliance or non-compliance. I had noticed that Simon has a passion for keeping the forums well formatted and he is often "on line early" because of his location "down under".
Absolutely, there is nothing that precludes a Moderator from being a great coder. In fact, most (if not all) of our Moderators are very skillful computer scientists and engineers with a lot of experience. I can remember when some who are very skillful now (2019) were not very skillful 10 or 15 years ago when they first appeared on the scene. Beginners today will be the experts of tomorrow. Everyone should remember to keep the "mind of the beginner" and to always learn new skills, programming languages, operating systems, admin skills and techniques. Everyone should remain open minded to new ideas and embrace change.
However, it important for all Members to note, that Moderators who do not actively work to insure that forum rules and community guidelines are followed, posts are correctly formatted, titles of discussions are edited to be more descriptive, spammer are quickly sent to the bit bucket, or do not follow the rules themselves (for example, answering technical questions in private messages, bullying... all outlined in the rules which we all agreed to when we post here), will not be a moderator very long, regardless of their amazing coding skills, shining personalities or technical skills.
The rules and guidelines are, and always will be, applied equally and fairly across the board, regardless of technical skills or force of personality.
All Moderators who are inactive (do not perform a single moderation task, e.g: deleting a wrong tag, formatting a post, adding code tags, deleting spam, etc.) in the prior 60 days will be automatically moved to "forum advisor" status (by a daily cron process), unless they have notified they will be away. In the future, I plan to change this to 30 days; but for now, I'm keeping this requirement to 60 days. This will change to 30 days sometime in the future.
Moderating, simply stated, is a mostly "thankless" public service, a noble task to the community and good moderating makes the entire community much better for everyone and those who visit in the future.
A friend of mine noted that our site, even today, has over 1 million unique visitors a month. That is a lot of people seeking help and so there is can no doubt, if you believe in cause-and-effect like I do, that helping others is a very good thing to do in our lives. Helping millions and millions of people over the years is a "good thing" and our Moderation Team is a big part of all the "good karma".
I am very grateful and thankful to everyone here for the "good karma" and positive energy our site brings to the world, regardless of whether it is 4 million unique visitors a month, or 100 visitors a month.
Thank you all, everyone one of you.